Conflict Theory View of Religion

Below are some quotes that help to understand the conflict theory’s position concerning organized religion.

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet”. –Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

“The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense–not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide.” Arthur Schlesinger, in The Cycles of American History (1986)

Religion is the right arm of domestic and national despots, its mission is to domesticate; through the caress or the whip, cage or the noose, it’s all employed toward one end: to tame. First the woman, because the woman is the mother and teacher of the child, and the child will be the man.”-from Regenaracion by Paraxedis Gilberto Guerrero Hurtado, Mexican journalist and insurgent leader during the 1910 Revolution

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”-from The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine